Fix guides

Fix guides for the specific problems Docket reports. Each one explains what the issue costs you, then gives the change to make.

Before any individual guide, the question that decides whether an audit is worth anything: what do you do first? A list of 93 checks against a real site produces dozens of findings, and the order you work them in matters more than any single fix.

The order to fix things in

Docket ranks every finding by the same formula, and it is worth knowing because you can apply it by hand to any tool's output:

priority = severity x impact x reach / effort

Three of those are obvious. The fourth is where most tools go wrong: reach grows sub-linearly in the number of pages affected — a capped square root rather than a raw count. Without that damping, a trivial nit on every page of a large site outranks a noindex on your homepage, and the report becomes a list you scroll past. Sorting by "number of pages affected", which is the default in several crawlers, is exactly that failure.

In practice this collapses to a short rule. Fix anything that stops a page being indexed at all, first and immediately — those are rare and they are absolute. Then work down by priority, which naturally puts small changes on important pages above large changes on unimportant ones. A finding marked TRIVIAL or SMALL effort with HIGH severity is almost always the best hour you will spend.

What a fix guide here will not do

None of these say "improve your content" or "build quality links". If a guide cannot name the exact element to change, it has not earned the page. Where a change depends on something only you know — whether you want AI engines training on your writing, for instance — the guide sets out the decision rather than making it for you.

Fix AI crawler access in robots.txt

How to let ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude read your site without giving away training data — they are separate decisions and need separate rules. Measured against 6236 sites' robots.txt files, most people who block AI crawlers get this wrong in the same direction.

More coming

Guides for hreflang return tags, conflicting canonicals, soft 404s and structured data errors are being written. They will appear as each is written properly rather than as variations on a template.